The year in thirty insults
The following insults loosely chart the course of the political year.
The following insults loosely chart the course of the political year. They are also a record of shame. (One not felt by the perpetrators, of course.) I have been gathering them in real time, over the course of the year. I have not chosen them for amusement. They are not funny. They are not even “funny.” On the contrary, they are sad and disgusting, and they measure the profound degradation of tone that began with the first Trump administration and which is now in freefall in the second. Since this tone is contagious, no one is surprised that political discourse on both sides of the aisle is awash with such contaminants. But what is notable about the purely Republican insults I have selected here is that they are the utterances not of low-level activists, assistant professors, or minor political officials, but of the highest-ranking members of the current administration.
I have arranged these horrors chronologically, except for the very last one — which, as becomes clear, simply begs to be kept as coda.
—James Wood, staff writer and book critic, The New Yorker
1. “U.S. Number 1!... 51st state!”
[Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, visiting a library in Vermont that straddles the U.S.-Canadian border. January 30, 2025.]
2. “SHALOM, MAHMOUD.”
[The White House, on the detention of Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil. March 10, 2025.]
3. “Have you ever had somebody’s contact that shows their name and then you have somebody else’s number there?... Of course I didn’t see this loser in the group.”
[National security advisor Michael Waltz, on Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg. March 25, 2025.]
4. “You probably deserved it.”
[Indiana Senator Jim Banks (R), confronted by sacked federal worker. April 1, 2025.]
5. “They hate our beef because our beef is beautiful. And theirs is weak.”
[Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, on American versus European beef. April 2, 2025.]
6. “We borrow money from Chinese peasants to buy things those Chinese peasants manufacture.”
[Vice President JD Vance. April 3, 2025.]
7. “Peter Retarrdo.”
[Elon Musk on Trump’s trade advisor Peter Navarro. April 8, 2025.]
8. “Joanna is a piece of shit, clearly suffering from a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome rotting her pea-sized brain.”
[Trump spokesman Steven Cheung, on the Daily Beast’s Joanna Coles. April 27, 2025.]
9. “This dried-out ‘prune’ of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!) ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT until he gets back into the Country.… Then we’ll all see how it goes for him!”
[President Donald Trump, on Bruce Springsteen. May 16, 2025.]
10. “HAPPY MEMORIAL DAY TO ALL, INCLUDING THE SCUM THAT SPENT THE LAST FOUR YEARS TRYING TO DESTROY OUR COUNTRY.”
[President Donald Trump. May 26, 2025.]
11. “Nightmare on Waltz [sic] Street.”
[Utah Senator Mike Lee (R), on the assassination of Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, the parents of two adult children. Father’s Day, June 15, 2025.]
12. “Alligator Alcatraz.”
[Nickname of new deportation camp in the Florida Everglades. June 17, 2025.]
13. “The good news is, alligators are guaranteed at least 65 million meals if we get started now.”
[Right-wing conspiracy theorist and occasional presidential advisor Laura Loomer. June 30, 2025.]
14. “He’s a self-righteous, narcissistic parasite on New York City, and should be expelled from politics.”
[Charlie Kirk on then-mayoral candidate for New York City, Zohran Mamdani. July 11, 2025.]
15. “A stubborn MORON.”
[President Donald Trump on Fed chair Jerome Powell. August 1, 2025.]
16. “Import the third world, become the third world.”
[Charlie Kirk, on a video of Muslims gathered to pray in Washington Square Park. August 2, 2025.]
17. “The scum at the Washington Post.”
[Department of Defense Deputy Press Secretary Jacob Bliss. August 20, 2025.]
18. “Tons of food has gone into Gaza but Hamas savages stole it, ate lots of it to become corpulent.”
[U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee. August 22, 2025.]
19. “Chipocalypse Now… I love the smell of deportations in the morning.”
[President Donald Trump. September 6, 2025.]
20. “I don’t give a shit what you call it.”
[Vice President JD Vance, responding to the objection that blowing up Venezuelans on boats might be a war crime. September 6, 2025.]
21. “There is an ideology which has been steadily growing in this country which hates everything that is good, righteous and beautiful and celebrates everything that is warped, twisted and depraved. It is an ideology at war with family and nature. It is envious, malicious, and soulless.”
[White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller, on the killing of Charlie Kirk. September 11, 2025.]
22.“The left is the party of murder.”
[Elon Musk, on the killing of Charlie Kirk. September 11, 2025.]
23. “I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them.”
[President Donald Trump, at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service. September 21, 2025.]
24. “The Democrat party’s main constituency are made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals.”
[White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt. October 16, 2025.]
25. “A MAJOR LOWLIFE AND FAILURE. An ugly person, both inside and out! I beat him badly, and love watching him squirm now.”
[President Donald Trump on former President Joe Biden. October 30, 2025.]
26. “Quiet, piggy.”
[President Trump, to Catherine Lucey of Bloomberg News. November 14, 2025.]
27. “The seriously retarded Governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz.”
[President Donald Trump. November 28, 2025.]
28. “We could go one way or the other, and we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking garbage into our country. Ilhan Omar is garbage. She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage. These aren’t people who work.”
[President Donald Trump, on Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, and the Somali community. December 2, 2025.]
29. “Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS.”
[President Donald Trump, on Rob Reiner and Michele Singer, murdered in Brentwood. December 15, 2025.]
30. “We don’t believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility.”
[Vice President JD Vance. September 15, 2025.]
As getting anything over the transom of the New Yorker is about as easy as landing on Mars with a skateboard, James Woods has provided us with a all-too-rare chance to kill two birds with one zinger, as it were... At any rate, all the high-minded shock and disapproval of the Trump Rogue's Gallery misses one vital thing:
These clowns didn't vote themselves into power. They never claimed to be anything other than what they are. I have no realistic explanation as why a majority of
the American electorate would choose to dive headfirst into an overflowing cesspool
like this just because Trump sets up a diving with a crayon-written sign saying Free Swimming! I might also point out that although our Dear Leader can shrug off any amount of media tut-tutting and
microdosed political satire such as the New Yorker features, he only notices things like Kimmel and Seth Meyers (because they weaponize humor in a way most print media is afraid to. If you want to play this game, do it for real or stay off the field. Then maybe some of the all-day bowling pins who voted us into this mess will take notice and lend a hand digging us out....